Marcus Trescothick has sparkled for Somerset, but should not be in consideration for the Ashes © Getty Images

Calling England followers. Let’s be optimistic out there. Bit by bit, with the Ashes less than a year away and, even more important, a first series win in India for 23 years in the offing, the pieces seem to be plopping into place.

Freddie’s back and firing with one-and-a-half barrels, which is about as much as could reasonably be expected when you consider how little he’s played over the past 18 months; Matt Prior is grasping his second chance with the determination that marks out life’s winners; Stuart Broad is starting to bowl with the belief that underpins his batting; he may still insist on not looking where he’s bowling, but Jimmy Anderson has taken bigger strides than anyone this year; as evidenced by a greater trust in his own bowling than any of his captains has had, KP is blessed with the positive mindset that fuels every lucky leader.

And Steve Harmison, on his day the most intimidating bowler on the planet, is back, giving KP four speedsters capable of exceeding 90 mph (whether this renewed hunger is strictly in response to Sir Allen Stanford’s largesse is neither here nor there; he does this for the living, not the loving). Is it being greedy to hope Michael Vaughan can reclaim that silken touch? Maybe, but that can certainly be balanced by the painful acknowledgement, given his ebullient county form, that Marcus Trescothick will never, should never, return.

Last Saturday brought a sobering reminder of Somerset’s gain and England’s loss when Trescothick hammered 184 off 112 balls against Gloucestershire, not so much breaking his own national 40-over record, set just a few weeks earlier, but obliterating it, by fully 60 runs. To the inevitable question that followed, the answer was unequivocal: “I am done and dusted.”

Whether Kevin Pietersen’s powers of persuasion are extensive enough to compel a change of heart remains to be seen – and anyone who can persuade Harmison to spend less time with his family is not to be underestimated - but, for now, the prospect of translating such form to the international arena still appears to fill Trescothick with about as much enthusiasm as a long weekend with Robert Mugabe. Even the stoniest heart, surely, would not begrudge him his priorities.

At least the story has now been told. Whether it is the full one cannot be certain, but at least the chain of events that led to England’s greatest casualty of the post-Oval 2005 era, is now that much easier to swallow. Almost as easy, in fact, as the mints Trescothick confesses to having used in a shameless if vain attempt to help his bowlers stem those tidal waves during the 2001 Ashes.

Trescothick’s mea culpa of an autobiography, Coming Back To Me, serialised in the News of the World, traces this sad tale in all its gory unglory. A tale of loss, fear and depression, it is nothing if not a cautionary tale for these sporting times. It is worth recounting the odd passage. Plagued by guilt over his refusal to return home following the sudden deaths of his wife, Hayley’s, father and grandfather, the Pakistan tour of 2005 found him “exhausted, emotionally vulnerable, isolated and far from home…ready for the taking”.

Come India the following February he was gone: “I never saw the ball that got me out [against a Board President’s XI in Vadodara]. I knew I was going to crack. I threw my helmet in my bag and there, in the middle of the dressing-room, I let it all out. I said: ‘I’ve got to go home.’ Then I began sobbing. I rushed outside. I was nervous, uptight and retching and I didn’t want to cause any more of a scene in front of the other players. But Fletch [England coach Duncan Fletcher] grabbed me to get me out of sight. At that point I was a shell. I didn’t care. I’d lost the will to do anything else.”

The following November, an attempted comeback against New South Wales ended when he requested permission to leave the field to go to the loo, and never returned. “It was as though someone flicked a switch. I knew it was over. The tears welled up as I started to walk back to the pavilion. I knew I no longer had any say in the matter. The illness had come back, the bastard had returned, and the shadow cast by its black wings consumed me again.” The heart bleeds.

The recent confessions of Stuart MacGill, Michael Slater, Shaun Tait and Lou Vincent prove that Trescothick is far from alone in his admission of mental frailty, never an easy thing to do amid such a macho world but a welcome sign that dressing rooms are becoming less oppressive. Nor, of course, should we be in the slightest bit surprised that players buckle under the pressure.

A recent ICC bulletin from Dubai claims that, from 1993 to 2000, the top 20 most active players “featured in an average of 62 days international cricket a year, while between 2000 and 2007, this rose to just over 71”. Participation rates among fast bowlers, moreover, “have remained consistently around 76%”. These figures, though, take no account of the time spent away from home and hearth, nor, indeed, of the way in which tours have multiplied in quantity while shrinking in length, compressing and hence intensifying the pressures.

Not that the ICC shrinks from such an uncomfortable analysis. Over the past two decades, its researchers have calculated, the average duration of a five-match Test series has “condensed” from 68.63 days to 48.17, ie by nearly 30%; for a three-match rubber, admittedly much the more common, the figures are 27.44 to 22.64, hoisting the intensity factor by nearly 20%. Next spring, India are scheduled to go to New Zealand and cram in two Tests, five ODIs and a Twenty20 international, plus a three-day warm-up match, in barely a month. That might suit the likes of Trescothick and Harmison, uneager as they are to be on the road, but there has to be a better balance than this, surely.

To watch Trescothick thrash and swat Worcestershire’s bowlers all over Taunton last night was to see a free spirit on cruise control. The drives and pulls were devoid of doubt, bereft of caution. Here was a cricketer enjoying his job, an entertainer doing what he does best: a big goldfish revelling in a smaller, grubbier, more opaque bowl. Helping Somerset finally land that elusive Championship pennant is now the summit of his ambitions. To ask him to return to the wider public gaze would almost certainly end in tears for all concerned, as Charl Willoughby, his worldly-wise South African teammate, emphasised this week.

“The illness made him a bit introverted and closed,” Willoughby recalled, “but since he’s put his international career behind him he is one of the nicest guys you could play with. He’s open, he’s generous, willing to offer advice to anybody. He’s an awesome cricketer and England definitely miss him but they’ve got to be understanding that he is a human being. They can’t expect him to come back because it will affect him again.”

So let’s be grateful out there. That Harmy seems to be as ready, willing and able as he has ever been. That, regardless of today’s result at The Oval, a fitful summer is ending in considerably better fashion than looked possible a month ago. And that Tresco is smiling again.

	Surely the priority, if you really do insist on flinging money at sport, should be with those who truly make us feel proud, or at least better © Getty Images

I know you’ve been having a tough time since moving from No.11 to No.10, what with all the economic worries, the cash-for-gongs saga, record levels of dissatisfaction with your premiership and that curious-looking Milliband chap sniffing your throne, so I’m not entirely surprised to see you taking such pleasure in the performance of all those “Team GB” cyclists, oarsmen and sailors in Beijing. However, I don’t think it would be fair on you to let you get too carried away. Which is why I am here to set you straight.

"Success in rowing, sailing and track cycling can essentially be bought by siphoning off money from the public purse and handing it to the athletes who are then able to train like professionals ... Success in sport - like in the agricultural market - is easier when it receives huge state subsidies." So wrote Matthew Syed, a former Olympian, in The Times the other day. OK, so he was a ping-ponger, out for himself from first bobbled serve to final fluffed smash, but the point remains. If you really want to give yourself a worthwhile goal, let’s see what you can do about our regular national teams, notably the lot who endeavour to play cricket.

To be honest, and I reckon most of your subjects would back me up, I would far prefer our soccer-rockers, rugger-buggers and willow-wielders win a few more games than a ragtag collection of largely university and/or public school types bring home more golds in more unwatchable sports than China and the US combined from a quadrennial event that costs more to stage than the GDP of Southern Africa. If you are tempted to believe I am one of those people who regard the “winning” of the right to stage the 2012 Olympics to be something of a costly and catastrophic defeat, I will not take offence.

As Ed Smith, the most literate county captain since Mike Brearley, pointed out in The Guardian, nearly 60% of Britain's medallists at Athens in 2004 went to independent schools. “Chasing cherry-picked Olympic dreams in which the winners are the privileged, cynics say, is a misappropriation of the public purse,” he wrote. “After 11 years of New Labour, British sport seems less meritocratic than ever.” I’ll second that emotion, and third it.

Surely the priority, if you really do insist on flinging money at sport, should be with those who truly make us feel proud, or at least better. And since team sports remain the last refuge for semi-selfless endeavour and true collectivism, and since you did used to be something of a leftie, that priority should probably lie with soccer, rugby union and cricket, each of them a nourishing crust in our daily bread. That said, soccer doesn’t deserve it (fancy putting club before country!) and rugby union doesn’t need it, so that leaves cricket.

I realise that, being Scottish, all this might mean less than nothing to you. Even if it does, you’re probably still peeved at the way Douglas Jardine, Mike Denness and Gavin Hamilton were treated by the selectors. But have you forgotten? Labour won the 2005 General Election on the back of an Ashes triumph. If you want to take your subjects’ minds off the property crash, not to mention secure a second term, you wait and see how feelgood the feelgood factor is when the urn is regained next summer. Mark my words – calling a snap election for early September will pay dividends.

Of course, simply chucking millions at causes, however worthy, isn’t necessarily the answer. It depends on how you chuck ’em. Have a look at the upper echelons of the current county averages (you’ll have to go online; the papers can’t be bothered printing them anymore) and note all those Africans, Aussies and non-Flying Dutchmen. And the reason for that, once more, is privilege. Which brings us to your beloved school system.

You and your party are forever blathering on about broadening educational opportunity, and the need to give half the country a university degree (given the plummeting standards of literacy and numeracy in secondary schools, the latter was not, on reflection, the cleverest idea, but hey, you can blame that on your old mate Tony B). But what kind of a country sells off most of its playing fields for supermarket development? Unless your parents can afford to pay by the barrowload for your education, the chances of being coached properly at school are miniscule. And you only have to look at the talent little ol’ Sri Lanka are turning out of their schools (yes, Sri Lanka!) to appreciate the value of such a breeding ground.

So, Gordon, if you really, really want to do something for sport, the answer should be as clear and plain and, well, dull as your demagoguery: buy back those playing fields and crank up the wages of the teachers who will have to work overtime to raise our future Kevin Pietersens and Darren Pattinsons. OK, Jimmy Andersons and Monty Panesars. And while you’re about it, sending a sicknote to IOC, confessing to your undying regret that staging the Olympics could bankrupt the nation, wouldn’t hurt either.

Yours sincerely

A Hopeful Romantic (Socialist branch)

	In two-and-a-half seasons as captain of Kent, Robert Key has grown enormously in stature, among opponents as well as team-mates © Getty Images

Funny how things come back to bite even the hardiest bum. But for English wariness, the review system trial that appears to have gone down so well in Colombo and Galle would have been in force during the Basil D’Oliveira series, in which case England might well have won the third Test and levelled a series that in all other respects showcased why modern Test cricket, at its most competitive and invigorating, is streets ahead of where it has ever been.

Indeed, had but one of the balls that James Anderson fizzed across a clueless, groping Graeme Smith during the opening phase of South Africa’s chase caught the edge they deserved, Poms might well be celebrating a remarkable comeback against a side, lest we forget, that could well end Australia’s seemingly interminable dominance before next year’s over-hyped and undermining A**** debate. That, though, would merely have papered over those widening cracks and deepening holes, which makes what actually happened, and their inevitable consequences, more desirable.

Michael Vaughan’s decision to step down was firmly in keeping with the man who has led England to more Test victories than any other captain. So long as his personal form refused to improve, the self-doubts that festered in New Zealand were bound to resurface sooner or later, and Vaughan has too much self-esteem to be able to cope with persistent failure. One wonders, with every cheap dismissal, how easy he found it to look at himself in the mirror, to accept that he wasn’t pulling his weight, wasn’t worth his place as a player. (And three 50-plus scores in 17 post-knee-op innings against strong attacks – Sri Lanka, India and South Africa – certainly infers as much.)

The last England captain obliged to confront this sort of brutal, unforgiving truth for an extended period was Mike Brearley, who was not only a good few years older than Vaughan - and hence less motivated to soldier on, to battle the demons and prolong the denial – but also far more aware of his own (admittedly greater) shortcomings as a batsman. “I had to struggle in Test cricket,” Brearley once confessed, “with an inner voice which told me I had no right to be there.” Vaughan has never been besieged by such a sense of inferiority. For the best part of four years he was demonstrably England’s best batsman. How fortunate, moreover, that when he did enter decline, in 2005, it coincided with the emergence of Kevin Pietersen, without whom the A**** would never have been regained.

Few would argue that Vaughan has not been one of the most intuitive and astute captains of the decade. With considerably fewer resources at his disposal, Stephen Fleming probably had the edge, though Mahela Jayawardene may yet be remembered with greater awe than either. Vaughan also had the good fortune to inherit, from Nasser Hussain, the bedrock of a good, going on very good, team. Since returning to the captaincy last summer, however, it has been hard to avoid the conclusion that his ability to inspire, his man-management, has faded.

Nowhere has this been plainer than in the case of Steve Harmison, the fully-motivated version of whom would surely have prevented South Africa from stacking up all those runs at Lord’s and Headingley, much less forestalled that record chase at Edgbaston. The suspicion those leadership skills were waning, though, stemmed from his indiscreet comments about the Fredalo affair made during an interview with the Guardian last year. Having said what possibly needed to be said, his subsequent attempts at denial were not so much daft and unworthy as indicative of the uncertainty that besets any leader-in-absentia.

It is also hard not to believe that Vaughan saw England’s failure to convert their revival at Edgbaston into victory as a personal one. Had it gone the other way, would he have resigned/been persuaded to step down (the jury’s still out on that one)? I doubt it. In victory he would surely have been emboldened, and perhaps inspired to reclaim form with the bat. More likely, he might have convinced himself he was fireproof, never a useful thing for a captain. Again, therefore, this particular cloud does not so much possess a silver lining as a golden one.

This, after all, is a golden opportunity, finally, to put some distance between the Peter Moores era and the Duncan Fletcher one, to give the latter his due and the former his head. Fletcher, with Nasser Hussain and later Vaughan as co-pilot, navigated England from the depths to the peaks. We are fast-approaching the third anniversary of that A**** triumph and only fleetingly, in Mumbai and at Old Trafford in 2006, have England - notwithstanding the fact that they have never since put that Oval XI into the field - approached that brand of intimidating swagger. It would be cruel to make too much of the fact that Vaughan was captain on neither occasion.

So, where to next? The fact that Paul Collingwood simultaneously renounced the one-day captaincy – always inevitable in the wake of the Grant Elliot business - leaves the way conveniently clear for the two roles to be united under one banner, the ideal scenario according to the national selector, Geoff Miller, and many more sages besides. There is a strong case in favour of maintaining the split duties, if only because that would allow Andrew Strauss to take over the five-day reins, but that step would be strictly and needlessly short-termist. Strauss has rallied strongly since his career was being obituarised in New Zealand, yes, but that steadily declining batting average makes it difficult to picture him enjoying the four-to-five-year reign enjoyed by the last four lengthy incumbents, namely Vaughan, Nasser Hussain, Mike Atherton and Graham Gooch.

Given that Alastair Cook is far too inexperienced and that burdening the barely-reborn Andrew Flintoff would make about as much sense as appointing Prince Andrew, only two plausible options remain, neither of which could be described as safe. On the one hand there is Pietersen, whose unstinting self-belief could well rub off on the younger players; on the other, Robert Key, the most respected skipper on the county circuit, both of whom warrant berths in the Test and limited-overs sides.

The risk with Pietersen is two-fold. One, the responsibility may lead to caution, introspection and introversion, and hence impair his genius as a batsman; two, rather than the confidence and adventurousness, it is the rashness that could rub off. It is worth remembering, too, how little leadership experience he has. It is also worth remembering that tendency, so evident in his pontifications about the IPL, to say one thing to one branch of the media then contradict himself without so much as a pause for breath. Being a maverick player is all very well; how many mavericks have enjoyed extensive periods of international success as leaders? Not Ian Botham, not Flintoff, not Carl Hooper. Australia never trusted Keith Miller and at least he had a track record with New South Wales.

Key has a number of compelling assets. In two-and-a-half seasons as captain of Kent, he has grown enormously in stature, among opponents as well as team-mates: a laid-back soul with the capacity to rouse; an enabler as well as an exemplar. Presiding over a county dressing room wherein the main contributors are Pakistani and South African and the rest mostly young ’uns is no easy matter, yet Kent have been this season’s most consistent outfit across all formats. He is also one of two batsmen – Owais Shah being the other – who could strengthen England’s shaky order at The Oval and beyond. And unlike Shah he would fit naturally and neatly into the top three.

But perhaps the biggest factor in Key’s favour is that he played no part whatsoever in the 2005 A****. Which means that he is not besotted with, coloured by nor reliant on the past. He cannot use it as a panacea, a means of consolation when times get tough and the rhymes rough. Not for him the regular self-affirming, and often self-deluding, reminders of heights attained. Not for him the knowledge that he is extremely unlikely to replicate them, collectively if not individually. Not for him the pot of gold reached prematurely.

It is not often that an outsider comes straight into an international dressing room as captain, and most of those – in keeping with this country’s unusual, traditional and mostly misplaced insistence on appointing captain then team - have been English. Tony Lewis and Keith Fletcher did so for the 1972-73 and 1981-82 tours of India respectively, and Chris Cowdrey for a single chapter of the 1988 Wisden Trophy rubber: none could be considered even a qualified success. Key, though, is firm friends with Flintoff, is fondly regarded by all and, most importantly, is worth his place strictly on playing ability, which is not something that could be said of Cowdrey, Fletcher or Lewis.

It would be a bold move to appoint Key, yes, but also a sensible one. Being told that history is there to be defied can only add to a challenge he would surely relish.